Wednesday, October 25, 2006

I was going to write this afternoon about Conservative finance minister Jim Flaherty's laughable assertions that the Liberals have a bad record on fiscal management and would somehow plunge the country into deficit.

In fact, it is the Liberal government of course that finally balanced the budget, mandated that surpluses be paid to the debt, made significant debt repayments that have saved billions in interest charges, introduced the most significant, broad-based tax cuts in Canadian history, and reinvested in our social programs.

I was going to blog about that, but since Steve have already done a great job of addressing the topic I'll invite you to read his post, and Bob's where he disects Flaherty's surplus spin.

Instead, I'll submit this as another piece of evidence that we as Liberals need to be strong, loud, proud and vocal in holding onto, trumpeting and defending our record, particularly as fiscal managers.

We can't let Harper, Flaherty and their Ministry of Truth colleagues rewrite history and send our historic achievements down the memory hole.

UPDATE: Liberal MP Stephen Owen also put it well this afternoon with this statement in the House of Commons:

Mr. Speaker, this government has shown contempt. Yesterday, it was claimed by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Unelected Minister of Public Works that the Liberal government had racked-up deficits.

Has the honourable member been asleep for the last decade? The Liberal government’s economic record is the best Canada has ever known. Eight straight Liberal surpluses, paid down billions of dollars on the national debt which was spinning out of control at the end of Canada’s last experiment in Conservative government.

In fact, the last Conservative surplus, other than the one that they inherited from this government, was in 1912, Mr. Speaker! Conservative tax policies have already been exposed as anti-competitive, anti-democratic, and anti-everything that sound economic policy preaches.

They want to turn surplus to deficit with tax breaks for the rich, just like they did in Ontario, and the Mike Harris triumphrate across the way is here to help them do the job.

The Liberal economic record speaks for itself, Mr. Speaker, as does the contempt that this government shows for Canadians…(mic cuts out)

Atta boy, Stephen! A number of other Liberal MPs also made similar statements, I'm glad to see we're not letting this nonesense slide by unanswered.